ABSTRACT: Symantec Research Labs has offices in the Los Angeles, California Bay Area, and in Europe. Our mission is to protect the privacy and security of individuals and small, medium, and large organizations. This talk will describe our efforts to protect vulnerable individuals. In particular, researchers have uncovered ways by which technology is used by perpetrators of Intimate Partner Violence to surveil their victims. Mobile applications are particularly convenient for this purpose, and in IEEE S&P 2018, Chatterjee et al., provided methods to identify applications used by abusers for surveillance purposes. In partnership with this team, Symantec Research Labs has discovered several categories of abusive software that exist on devices alongside covert Intimate Partner Surveillance applications. We provide a view of our in-flight research results in this talk.

BIO: Kevin Roundy has been at Symantec Research Labs since 2012, when he completed his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin. Kevin’s dissertation focused on binary analysis and instrumentation of obfuscated and defensive malware programs. Since joining Symantec, his research has broadened to include cross-product intrusion detection, reputation systems, data mining, and attack visualization. Most recently he has been working on human and computer interaction and at ways that technology is used against vulnerable populations.